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Every notetaking app promises to double your productivity - and after a week, you're back to Apple Notes. Tana's radically different approach [4] is built to delegate your busywork to AI.
Cybertruck sales are stalling a year into production. While Tesla claimed to have over 1 million reservations for the vehicle, it had lowered its reservation deposit to just $100 and the production version of the truck was more expensive and had less range than what Tesla originally announced. The company delivered around 40,000 Cybertrucks before opening orders beyond the reservation program. It's estimated that Tesla delivered between 9,000 and 12,000 Cybertrucks in Q4.
OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. Within two months, its site was being visited by more than 100 million visitors. The startup hasn't been the same since. This article contains an interview with OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman. Altman explains his infamous four-day firing, how he runs OpenAI, his plans for the Trump-Musk presidency, and his relentless pursuit of artificial general intelligence.
Framework plans to release a laptop that can support a RISC-V mainboard in 2025. RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture (a set of valid instructions programs can execute on a processor) that provides a viable alternative to x86 and Arm. It is open source, making it easy to customize hardware. While current RISC-V chips perform well behind x86 and Arm-powered alternatives, performance will be much better in the coming year.
SpaceX has made special improvements for its seventh Starship test flight, which may be on January 10. The test will attempt Starship's first payload deployment test, multiple reentry experiments geared towards ship catch and reuse, and the launch and return of the Super Heavy booster. The booster will splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico if the catching systems aren't healthy during the launch. The booster will slow down from supersonic speeds upon return, which will result in sonic booms around the catch area.
There was a trend a while ago where people kept asking AI image generators to make something 'more X', which interestingly resulted in the images eventually becoming something cosmic. This article looks at whether this concept could apply to large language model-generated code - whether asking an LLM to 'make code better' can result in improvements. It appears that asking an LLM to 'write code better' results in better code compared to direct prompting (at least with Claude 3.5 Sonnet). LLMs can produce interesting ideas and tool suggestions even if the output can't be used as is.
Malware on PyPI is a persistent problem. PyPI recently added the ability to quarantine projects. Administrators are able to mark projects as potentially harmful, which prevents it from being easily installed by users. This post discusses how the feature was implemented and upcoming improvements.
A stablecoin network could drop payment fees to essentially zero. Merchants attempting to avoid credit card processing fees is not a new concept, but the problem is in getting customers to switch their payment methods. It is possible to shift customer behavior under the right conditions. The potential market for cheaper, faster, and more efficient payment methods is clearly strong - this article discusses how a brand-new stablecoin bank could be used to align incentives to get everyone on board.
Bench, an accounting and tax startup based in Canada, suddenly shut down on December 27 after 13 years of operation. The company's hundreds of staff were laid off immediately without any severance or notice. Some of its staff claim that the company's struggles were due to a push to embrace AI and other automation tools in recent years. Overreliance on automation tools, sometimes at the expense of human workers, caused delays, which made some customers leave. Bench was saved by an unlikely acquistion by Employer.com, who extended a large number of job offers to former Bench staff.
Thoughts from Sam Altman about how OpenAI's journey has gone so far and some of the things he's learned along the way.
Over half of the spending will take place in the US.
The key isn't better code generation, it's better code understanding.
The US and China signed a bilateral science and technology agreement on December 13 that limits the topics allowed to be jointly studied, closes opportunities for collaboration, and introduces a new dispute resolution mechanism.
Samsung and Google are officially rolling out Eclipse Audio, a three-dimensional audio format, on Samsung's 2025 lineup of Crystal UHD, Neo QLED 8K TVs, and soundbars.
Tesla shares fell by around 7% in trading on Thursday after Tesla released its fourth-quarter vehicle production and deliveries report. The company's shares finished up 63% for the year. They reached an all-time high in mid-December. Tesla aims to offer lower-cost and autonomous vehicles in 2025. This is predicted to lead to 20% to 30% growth over 2024.
SpaceX's Starlink now serves over 4.6 million users across 118 countries and territories. The company reported 3 million users back in May. It has since expanded its services to 27 new markets. SpaceX completed 89 launches dedicated to building and enhancing the Starlink satellite constellation throughout last year. The Starlink network currently has over 7,000 active satellites in low Earth orbit, with nearly 350 designed to connect directly to LTE phones.
Anthrobots are synthetic biological proto-organisms made of living cells with un-edited genomes. They could have many future uses in the human body, including laying down pro-regenerative molecules, clearing plaque from arteries, healing spinal cord or retinal damage, dealing with cancer cells or bacteria in the gut, or informing doctors of the status of the surrounding tissues. Anthrobots do not exponentially reproduce and just biodegrade at the end of their lifespan. Scientists are still experimenting with these lifeforms to get a true idea of their capabilities in various problem spaces.
Wi-Fi 8 looks to be focused on greater reliability rather than on pushing bandwidth even higher. It will make the speed gains promised by Wi-Fi 7 more of a reality. End users will not see the full benefits until they have upgraded both their access points and endpoint devices to the new standard. The first devices with Wi-Fi 8 are not expected to roll out until the second half of 2028.
Zasper is an IDE designed to support massive concurrency. It has a minimal memory footprint and provides exceptional speed. Zasper can be used to run REPL-style data applications like Jupyter notebooks. It is currently fully supported on Mac, with limited support on Linux.
Deepseek's flagship model, v3, is a 607B Mixture-of-Experts model with 37B active parameters. The company achieved remarkable performance while keeping training costs surprisingly low. The model outperforms other alternatives at its price point. It excels at reasoning and math, surpassing GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
Heaps of companies want employees with long-term experience. Many of these companies aren't attractive to younger workers and would be glad to hire someone with experience. Experienced workers can also enter into consulting/professional services, which provides a varied and interesting work environment. The expiry date for a software engineer is definitely much later than 40 - many are still working late into their 50s and 60s.
Many people are convinced that companies are targeting ads to them by listening through their phone's microphones. For this to be true, companies would have to record audio snippets, transmit them back to their servers for additional processing, and then feed that data into a system that forwards it to advertising partners. This is far-fetched, especially for companies like Apple, which has a brand and reputation as a privacy-first company and spends large amounts on product design and engineering to prevent apps from doing exactly this kind of thing. The more likely scenario is that the quality of targeting is high and that people just aren't that different from each other.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals said that the FCC lacked the authority to oversee wireless and home-broadband services.
Object identifiers are a standardized key-value system for naming any object or concept.
If approved, Apple will pay up to $20 per Siri-enabled device (for up to five devices) to customers who made purchases between September 17, 2014, and December 31, 2024.
Last week, AWS added another layer to S3 Buckets and introduced S3 Tables for storing data in Apache Iceberg.
A reflection of how life has been after selling a company from Vinay Hiremath, the CTO and co-founder of Loom.
The projects include 'This is Not My Name' by Liuhuaying Yang, 'Your Name In Landsat' by NASA Landsat Science, and the 'Climate—Conflict—Vulnerability Index' by the German Federal Foreign Office.
Nvidia will be leaning more heavily into robotics in 2025. It will launch a new generation of compact computers for humanoid robots called Jetson Thor in the first half of next year. Nvidia aims to provide robot makers with an underlying OEM as its largest customers work to lessen their dependence on the company's AI chips by developing their own.
Blue Origin successfully performed a hotfire of its New Glenn rocket on December 27, the same day it was issued a commercial space launch license from the US Federal Aviation Administration. The company remains tightlipped about when it will launch its rocket, but it had claimed earlier in the year to be targeting a launch before the end of the year. New Glenn was designed to be partly reusable. Its first stage, which is designed to be good for a minimum of 25 missions, will land on a downrange sea-based platform.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems has announced plans to build the world's first nuclear fusion power plant. The plant will be located in Chesterfield County, Virginia. If successful, the plant will infuse 400 megawatts power into the state's electrical grid starting in the early 2030s. Fusion technology still hasn't been proven to be viable - previous attempts by well-financed tech companies have failed.
China plans to start building a demonstration thorium-based molten-salt reactor in the Gobi Desert next year. The 10-megawatt reactor project is scheduled to be operational by 2030. Thorium-232 is more abundant on Earth than uranium-235, but it isn't directly fissile, so it must first be transformed into fissile uranium-233, which is technically feasible, but it is unknown whether that is economical and practical. If feasible, thorium, which is waste product of China's huge rare earth mining industry, could reduce dependence on uranium.
SQLite is the most deployed and used database. It is likely used more than all other databases combined. SQLite is only maintained by three people who don't allow outside contributions. This blog post lists 24 facts about the database.
A dependency consists of a checksum, a location, a name, and a version. The checksum is a cryptographic hash of the contents of the dependency. The location tells systems how to acquire the dependency. The name tells when two different dependencies correspond to different versions of the same thing. The version is a specific rule about dependency substitutability.
Gene drives are a clever genetic trick that forces a particular gene to be inherited by nearly all offspring rather than the usual 50-50 chance in normal inheritance. They can propagate a desired mutation through an entire population theoretically with only a few mating events. Some iterations of gene drives have been demonstrated to work in fruit flies, but mosquitoes are much more complicated and we don't fully understand them yet. This technology is also being developed in countries where malaria is not endemic - the countries that have problems with mosquitoes may not want to deal with the potential ecological issues that may result from the use of gene drives.
The modern web is incredibly complex. WebAssembly made web technology the core of the future of computing. We are already using the browser as a replacement for operating systems' graphics toolkits. Simplifying the web won't fix many of the widespread problems. There are a lot of smaller networks currently available that provide a look into what an alternative to the web might look like.
Run:ai offers GPU orchestration software that organizes groups of GPUs more efficiently.
Founders are always selling - sales is a skill that anyone can get good at.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University have trained robots to manipulate needles, tie knots, and suture wounds using video recordings of human-controlled robotic arms performing surgical tasks.
Passkeys were supposed to fix the problems with passwords, but their inconsistent implementation has made them less practical than password managers.
A look over a year of writing by Anu Atluru, a founder and writer from NYC.
People with high salaries and net worth tend to live longer lives due to access to better healthcare, nutrition, and safer environments.
Google plans to introduce a number of AI features in the first half of next year. The company recently held a strategy meeting for next year where executives set the stage for a year of increased competition, regulatory hurdles, and advancements in AI. CEO Sundar Pichai has warned employees that 2025 will be a challenging year as the company is facing scrutiny across the world. While Google's search business still has dominant market share, generative AI has brought with it a host of new competitors.
OpenAI will create a public benefit corporation to oversee commercial operations when it moves towards a for-profit structure in 2025. The public benefit corporation will remove some of OpenAI's nonprofit restrictions and allow it to function more like a high-growth startup. The scale of capital that the company needs requires conventional equity and a less complicated structure. OpenAI's effort to restructure faces major hurdles, including a lawsuit from Elon Musk and an outflow of high-level talent.
Humans think at a rate of 10 bits per second. Our bodies' sensory systems gather environmental data at a rate of a billion bits per second, 100 million times faster than our thought processes. It is unknown why humans are only able to think a single thought at a time rather than many at a time in parallel the way our sensory systems work. One theory is that the brain was first evolved for navigation - it would make sense that we can only follow one 'path' of thought at a time if our brain evolved from a simple system to follow paths.
Space exploration dazzled the world in 2024 - NASA's Europa Clipper began its journey to study Jupiter's moon Europa, SpaceX's Starship achieved its first successful landing, China's Chang'e 6 mission successfully returned samples from the far side of the Moon, and the International Space Station continued to host international crews and private missions. Space agencies are gearing up for even more ambitious goals in 2025. This article looks at the most exciting missions planned for the coming year. These include CLPS, an initiative from NASA to deliver science and technology payloads to the Moon using commercial landers; SPHEREx, a mission that will survey the sky in near-infrared light to create a comprehensive map of the universe; Space Rider, and uncrewed spaceplane from the European Space Agency; and Japan's M2/Resilience mission, which will launch a lander and micro-rover to the lunar surface.
Software designers usually have a simple concept in mind when writing programs - understanding this concept allows them to find sections of programs that must be altered when an update or correction is needed. Changes made by people who don't understand the original design concept almost always cause the structure of the program to degrade. The changes will be inconsistent or invalidate the original concept. After many such changes, nobody will understand the modified product. Software that has been repeatedly modified in this way becomes very expensive to update.
It's probably easier to get to staff engineer by getting hired as doing so via promotions requires you to be known and valued by your organization. Companies value engineers who ship, so ship projects that the company cares about and don't spend time on pet projects. Don't worry too much about mentoring and leading, as long as you're leading projects successfully, or if doing so delivers value for the company. Getting to staff manager requires a lot of work from your manager - don't invest time in the promo packet until they're fully on board.
All small and medium-sized portable electronic devices (under 100 watts) sold in the EU must now be compatible with USB-C ports. The rule will also apply to laptops starting April 28, 2026. Apple removed the iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Pro, and third-generation iPhone SE from its EU online stores to comply with the regulation earlier this month. Other major markets, such as California and India, are following the EU's lead and will implement similar rules in the coming years.
This article talks about the implications of labor-replacing AI and the possible future that we might be facing. Labor is the human mental and physical effort that produces something of value. Capital goods are things that are used in the production of goods and services. Capital can refer to both the stock of capital goods and the money that can pay for them. AI will make capital a more general substitute for labor. There will be less need to pay humans for work as you can replace that with capital - data centers running software.